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Isles of the Empire of Asahi

I finally started to work on the Isles of the Empire of Asahi map for my project at the CWBP. First I printed NK's Fractal Terrains version of the region of concern in B/W at 36" wide. Then I used a sheet of translucent bond (cheaper than vellum) and hand-traced the coastal outline and all the islands. Then I scanned it in a 300 dpi lineart and imported to Xara Xtreme Pro 3.2.

I traced it again, with a mouse to create the interior base and colors for all the islands. I don't plan to keep the land textue, I just wanted something more interesting to show in this first post. I may, of course, dump the blue sea in favor of my more recent use of parchment style backgrounds instead.

Unlike my Genpei War Map, I don't plan to use my Ukiyo-e Symbol set. Instead, I plan to hand-draw all the mountains and terrain similar to my Lands of Crae regional map, but in much finer detail as this land mass is quite huge.

To give you some idea of how big this chain of islands is... just the main island (I call Anshu) from east to west is about 1800 miles long.

Next step is to create the hills and mountains, afterwhich I will cut the rivers.

It stays!

Originally Posted by Steel General

Looking good GP!

Just as a curiosity, are you going to keep the heavy black stroke on the land masses or is it just there for show?

SG, that "heavy black stroke" is no heavier than the Archean Trade League, or any of the Crae Lands/Barbarian maps - I used the same pen to stroke those lines. Its just this map is only at its start. Keep in mind I plan to pen the mountains, hills, forests, swamps and other major terrain features with that same pen. So once all the details are in this currently very empty map, the outline won't stand out quite so much.

Hoel - I haven't created the parchment map background yet, for this one. Where you see "white" now is showing the white background through the edge of the water. Once I place a parchment, the white will change to whatever color the parchment is. Though I will probably lessen the gradient so that its not quite as heavy.

I'm going to try to stroke some mountains in between jobs here at work, I probably won't get much done until after the work day is over. Update probably tonight!

Kaidan commercial map

I finally have something to show, but this is my commercial version, so as not to have any CC to other licensing issues with the CWBP (and being a derivative of NK's world map.) This is before labeling, but almost finished.

I dug up my Superstition Valley mountain objects for something different, and not having to hand-draw everything, from my Nov. 07 Challenge map.

This is more my size and island distribution than the original one in my previous post. Don't worry, when I have time I will get to that map as well.

It is interesting how you have mixed different visual styles in the terrain generation (forests and mountains for example) and still managed to do a good working map. I have to admit there are few things I would personally have done differently, but what I am to argue with a professional mapmaker I guess this is far from the full resolution version that will be delivered to the client?